Norway’s Ulvang Sets 30K Record : Cross-country: He wins skiing event in 1 hour 22 minutes 27.8 seconds. U.S.’s Koch is 42nd.

Two one-time forces in big-time cross-country ski racing made comebacks here Monday, Norway and Bill Koch.

Norway’s was considerably more successful. The Norwegians, led by Vegard Ulvang, swept the medals in a show of strength reminiscent of days long gone by.

Norway once dominated in ski-running, as the sport was called in its early days, but in recent decades has yielded to the skiers of the former Soviet Union and Finland. Four years ago, at Calgary, Norwegian men won only two cross-country medals, neither of them gold.

But Monday was Norge day. With hundreds of his countrymen cheering him on, waving flags and singing, Ulvang skied the fastest 30 kilometers in Olympic history, 1 hour 22 minutes 27.8 seconds, and gave Norway its first cross-country gold medal in 16 years. Teammates Bjorn Daehlie and Terje Langli finished second and third, respectively.

“I had a perfect race. Everything went really well,” said Ulvang, whose time was nearly two minutes faster than that skied by Soviet Alexei Prokurorov, the winner at Calgary.

Koch, the 1976 silver-medal winner of the 30K but skiing his first international race since he launched his comeback last April, shortly before turning 36, finished 42nd.

He had been hoping for better but has been saying right along that he intends to be a medal contender again in 1994, at Lillehammer, Norway. So, he wasn’t disappointed.

“I’m in the middle of the pack right now, and I think that’s not half bad for a little less than a year of training,” he said.

“I know the hard work’s ahead, and I always figured it was. I’ve got two more years, and I think, all things considered, this was just about as good as I could have hoped for. Well, I could have hoped for better, but it’s really not bad. I’m pretty pleased, just to be here at the Olympics and to be able to have raced.”

Koch found the course difficult.

“(It’s) very demanding in that we have to climb out of the stadium here eight times and those eight hills are the real crux because they’re all after a long downhill and your heart rate’s not quite adjusted,” he said.

Complaints, however, about the course or anything else, were the farthest thing from Koch’s mind.

“It wasn’t until I stopped for six years that I realized what a privilege it really was to be in this game,” he said. “I’m just so pleased to have another chance, to give it one more shot, and I have a special appreciation for it, now that I was without it for six years.”